Call For Papers: Vertigo: Fake news/real theory: A Seminar at ANU College of Law

The Australian National University College of Law Centre for Law, Arts, and the Humanities presents a Seminar on Vertigo: Fake news/real theory.

The event takes place on December 12, 2018.

The ANU contemporary critical theory group is hosting a one-day seminar exploring law, art, politics, and society in the 21st century.

This event will feature short papers of no more than 15 minutes that make an intervention or articulate an argument with succinct vigour, leaving plenty of room for lively and even contentious discussion.

We particularly encourage the attendance and participation of HDR students from a wide range of disciplines, as well as from early career and established scholars working on critical theory and critical legal theory.

The call for papers closes November 10.



More here.

Alfred Hitchcock on Bad Guys @ABAJournal

In the current issue of the ABA Journal:

Who's the Bad Guy: What Alfred Hitchcock Can Teach Lawyers About Villains and Villainy, by Philip Meyer

Ideas For Summer Reading

Abebooks.com, the used books search service, offers two interesting collections to examine. Guile and Mischief: Tricksters in Literature is a provocative look at deceivers in fiction and includes titles from folklore, the classics, and novels. 39 Books for a John Buchan Collection pays homage to the lawyer, adventurer, and diplomat who wrote so many thrillers. Buchan's famous The Thirty Nine Steps was recently remade for tv, and stars Rupert Penry-Jones and Lydia Leonard. The Hitchcock adaptation starring Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll appeared in 1935.

Great reading ideas for the summer.

Keep Watching the Skies

What actually killed the birds, which inspired Daphne du Maurier to write that short story which Alfred Hitchcock eventually turned into a 1963 thriller? Researchers say it was poisoned plankton, which entered the food chain, and which the feathered flyers eventually ingested. Here's more via an LSU press release on the harmful algae bloom, which LSU professor Sibel Bargu says are "naturally occuring" toxins. Mr. Hitchcock turned the natural phenomenon which occurred in 1961 into a malevolent force--an intentional but seemingly inexplicable attack by the birds of Bodega Bay on the humans of the area--and terrified the dickens out of Rod Taylor, Tippi Hedren, and the rest of us.

Freedom, Power, and the Control of Women in "Vertigo"

John (Jay) Steinmetz, University of Oregon, has published 'They Had the Power and the Freedom': A Genealogy of Patriarchal Violence in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo as an APSA 2011 Annual Meeting Paper. Here is the abstract.

The control of women is at the center of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, a misogyny of domination that is easily apparent. Less apparent in previous literature on Vertigo is the connection to a history of violence against women that threads through key scenes, where the expression "the freedom and the power" is spoken by the wife-murderer Gavin Elster, an authority on San Francisco history, and John "Scottie" Ferguson, who stalks and obsesses over what becomes three women: Madeleine Elster, Carlotta Valdez, and Judy Barton. The freedom and the power is something men once had, but they are slowly losing it, and there emerges the paranoia, the real vertigo. This phrase and its connotation, that of controlling women, connects both freedom and power to the mechanisms of patriarchy. One such mechanism in Vertigo is the deployment, in Foucaultian terms, of a myth: that Carlotta Valdez, thrown away by a rich man nearly 100 years ago, haunts Gavin Elster's wife Madeleine. This myth, the spurned woman, covers up the darker violence underneath, that of uxoricide. Foucault's repressive hypothesis, a deployment in discourse on the freedom and power of sexuality, can be mapped onto the myth of Carlotta Valdez and the killing of women that lies below its surface.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.